The secrets of Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture

Author Jo Hamya explains the background to interviewing Sebastian Barry

‘These are very private moments which I’m communicating to you,’ Sebastian Barry tells me over the phone, ‘but I think anyone embarking on a reading of a book, in this context especially, deserves all the private information they can get from the writer.’ We are talking about the process of writing The Secret Scripture, using an early outline we have dug up together to jog Barry’s memory. Back then the book’s title was still The Hammers and the Feathers. It had a linear, more overtly morally didactic plot, and was set during World War Two. Rather than being told by its heroine, it is more about her, and her use as a device to discuss religious and political ideologies in Thirties and Forties Ireland. 

The Secret Scripture, on the other hand, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Recounted partly as an autobiography by Roseanne, an almost 100-year-old patient of Roscommon asylum, and partly through the commonplace book of her psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, the book pieces together their conflicting accounts of her early life in post-Civil-War Sligo, and the events which led to her confinement. 

As we spoke, Barry’s voice came warmly down the line. He laughed often, and had a tendency to speak of Roseanne as though she were in the next room, temporarily indisposed and in need of him as a proxy. Sentences often vaulted midway through while he considered other possibilities, and then joined up to accommodate newly thought of information. To hear him tell it, the business of writing fiction contained all the gravitas and consequence of forming a relationship with someone. Below, he discusses the connection between real life and fiction, the novel’s controversial ending, and the process of unearthing character.  

‘The most important thing I had before I started writing vis à vis Roseanne was an image, a kind of snippet of a film in my head. I had seen the ending of Cyrano de Bergerac (dir. Jean-Paul Rappeneau), and at the end of the film, he’s just leaning against an enormous tree trunk. There’s a wind moving through the forest behind. I had an image of Roseanne (which is sort of in the book, but this is the fiction inside the fiction) of Roseanne and Eneas – or Charles as he’s called in the outline,  because Charles was his real name – the two of them standing there. They’ve just been swum across and been cleaned by the river, escaping from the asylum.

And it was just an image in my head of the two of them standing by the trees, with the wind moving through the trees like in that film. I thought, that’s what I really want. That’s what I had. And it was from that that I made the book. And the strange thing of course is that that’s what happens. She does mention her version of that dream. Those visualisations are the real things.

Ultimately, it’s not even about notes of music, it’s not even about the paint in the tubes of paint, it’s something beyond that.’

‘The psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, is not even mentioned in this outline. He didn’t exist in any shape or form. He appeared in the book because she mentions him. I was a few chapters in, and she was talking about her psychiatrist who comes in to her. And I think it was my agent who said, “we should have more about him”.  And I thought, “Eh. I want this book to be entirely Roseanne’s. I don’t want a man interfering with it in any shape or form, or having authorship”.

But what interested me about Dr. Grene was a kind of prosaicness, which was a kind of antidote to the essentially poetic nature of Roseanne. I felt it was doing something interesting. He’s so dull, in a way. I was very interested in that. I was very concerned early on that he was there as a kind of service character, which you don’t want. But I did need somebody eventually to read her account. So he was immensely useful for that.’

‘There was some controversy about the ending. But you know, there wasn’t any other it could possibly have. It was so bound into the journeys I made in the car [to my mother] playing Joni Mitchell’s Blue, trying to survive this event. It was inextricable. It wasn’t about writing fiction. It wasn’t anything except a kind of skein, or survival. Roseanne anchored that. I couldn’t possibly have disturbed it in the end. It’s an interesting thing for me, because I often think about it. She’s writing her book. Doctor Grene’s writing in his commonplace book. Father Gaunt is a kind of writer as well, I suppose. But there’s a fourth writer there, who’s me. And I was very concerned for Roseanne. That I had to prove that she hadn’t killed her child, because that’s what was at stake there. I didn’t want matricide, I didn’t want an ending where everything is up in the air either – I thought that would be an atrocity. I didn’t want to leave her floundering, or childless. 

So I was very, very happy to have somebody to hand who could be her magic…that’s how I understand the ending, it’s a sort of magic. At the same time, my beautiful friend, Ivor Browne, who glories in the title of Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, told me of instances where people who had been separated, mothers and sons… He knew of a case where a man had been on a train every morning, and had often seen a cleaning lady on the train carriage every morning for years and years and years. And eventually, however it happened, they discovered that she was actually his mother. And they had come from different parts of the country, and they had sort of ended up in the same place, as if that cable I described was indestructible, and it was always going to draw them together. I put great faith in that. I thought that was…there was a truth in that beyond the objections over what some people might conceive of as a Dickensian ending. But I thought it was worth keeping. I know it’s become debased, inverted commas, by soap operas and all that but there’s another stage before that where it can be quite true, and certainly quite magical in human terms.’

‘There’s a whole discipline in learning how to read your editor, let alone your editor reading you. It is a very nervy place, handing off a manuscript. You have to allow for the possibility that it’s a pile of malodorous nonsense — you just have to. And then you’ll put that away, and with the grace of God, you’ll write another book straightaway, but…I never have any opinion of my own on the work. I just don’t have any insight into it.  

When I gave The Secret Scripture to Angus [Cargill] he was very quiet about it. I had a play years ago called White Woman Street and in it, a character named Mo Mason says, “God listening, look in silence”. And it was that sort of silence, you know? Where something he thought good had arrived on his desk, but he didn’t want to say too much about it in case he scared away the angels. I remember that well.’